Flutter launched in an alpha stage last year, and the release of its new beta signifies a big step in its continuous development cycle. It's a mobile UI framework that's designed to make it easy for developers to create high-quality apps that run fast and look great, and it's targeted at app development for both Android and iOS.

Per Google's announcement post, some of Flutter's highlights include:

High-velocity development with features like stateful Hot Reload, a new reactive framework, rich widget set, and integrated tooling.

Since its alpha launch, Google's worked with its development community to add new features to Flutter, such as support for screen readers, development for the iPhone X and iOS 11, more image formatting, inline videos, etc.

Google says Flutter is a great tool for beginners and advanced developers alike, and you can start using it right now on Windows, Linux, and macOS. While many of you reading this may never personally work with Flutter, its beta should hopefully signify more apps in the near future that look and run even better than what we already have.